


The Cynic

by rynlight



Series: Semper Eternis [1]
Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Episode: s01e09 Why We Fight, The Old Guard Crossover, immortal au, light gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:15:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29952579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rynlight/pseuds/rynlight
Summary: After this third jump for Operation Varsity, Lewis Nixon was dead. Then he came back.
Series: Semper Eternis [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2202915
Kudos: 6





	The Cynic

When he looks back on that day, this is what he remembers: he wasn’t supposed to be there.

Among the officers there had been whispers about another jump, whispers that weren’t supposed to reach his ears, but he’d always had his ways. By the time he was being whisked to meetings held behind closed doors, he’d known half of their plan, constructed a dozen scenarios in his head about the ways an operation like that could go tits up and how to prevent and respond. When he was told he was being brought on as an observer on General Taylor’s orders, he was intrigued by the opportunity, _clamoring_ even.

When it came time to leave Haguenau, instead of crossing the border for Sturzelberg with the rest of the 101st, he was diverted a half day’s journey inland to the airbase where he’d sleep and prepare and board a plane for the last jump of his life.

 _Three’s a charm,_ he thinks as the light turns green and his feet propel him forward. There is a comfort in the routine, of the tugs and the checks and the counting. He notes, with no small amount of satisfaction, after a hat trick, he could veritably count this particular skill among the things he’d mastered during his time in the Army. _Tactical bombardment planning, battlefield analysis, ground recon, jumping out of a plane._ _What a concept._

In a flash, the two men before him have taken their leap, and then it’s his turn. His feet are on the edge and his hands are on the doorframe, and then they’re not. When he feels the nothingness and gives in to the pull of gravity, he is not thinking of death, but of how he never feels more alive than he does when he’s airborne and there’s nothing between him and oblivion but strings and yards of spun silk.

_One thousand two thousand three thousand four thousand -_

He pulls and feels the sharp, abrupt protest the chute makes against his downward trajectory, and for a moment, the familiar elation kicks in.

Then, just as suddenly, there is a whistling sound above him and to his left, and then there is sound everywhere, there is _wrongness_ , there is heat, white-hot and all-consuming. He turns his head upward and watches as a shell smashes with a fireball of light into the carrier.

The impact of the blast blows him sideways, haloing around the aircraft, sharp metal and flames flying. He feels the shrapnel before he sees it, registers what feels like a thousand shards of metal cutting him open, feels the flames blistering and scorching his skin before his eyes catch up to what has happened to his body. He does not know if the sound in his ears is the wind or his screams. There is a dull roar in his brain as he turns to look at the plane, sees bodies thrashing, aflame, falling out of the gaping mouth where the shell made impact.

Somehow in his haze, his muscles take over and reach for the string of his reserve chute. He pulls, his final broken fragments of hope vanishing as he watches the second chute deploy and then, like the rest of him, it is alight, tangling uselessly with the fiery shreds of his first chute.

He feels the adrenaline rush of his leap turning to ashes in his mouth.

There is nothing left to parry his descent. He is a meteor burning bright on its fixed path to destruction, Icarus plummeting to the earth, and there is no mercy in the woods of Diersfordt below him.

 _I am going to die,_ he thinks. _I am going to die and there is nothing I can do._ He’s startled by a rough, unearthly sound that he realizes is his own laughter in his burning throat. 

_Lucky me._  
  
He mind drifts, suddenly, to the stiflingly hot New Jersey summers of his boyhood, the smell of sea and salt and lemonade and pretzels and pollution. He pictures the downturned lines of Kathy’s mouth, the set line of disapproval that had become the hallmark of her face. The photograph of his son, wide-eyed, chin like his mother’s, tiny hands balled into fists. Blanche and her movie-star smile. He hears his mother’s laughter, and remembers, warmly, the glimmer of pride in her dark eyes as she turned in his arms on the dance floor at his send-off party. He wonders whether or not his father will mourn for him, or whether his death will be a secret, unspoken relief, one step closer to the moment his father can sever ties with the family that he has grown tired of. As he falls, Lewis Nixon is struggling to recall the last thing Dick Winters says to him, frustrated that he can’t remember the words.

He wonders, vaguely, whether there will be enough of him unburnt, enough parts of him intact left to recognize in the carnage, enough to send home, when he is suddenly enveloped by the nuclear explosion of pain in each of his senses as he and the earth collide in splinters and cracks of bone and a spray of blood, the stench of his own charring flesh mixed with dirt in his nose and the taste of death and bile sharp in his throat as his world goes blurry at the edges then cuts to darkness.

  
_____________

_He is weightless, nothing, an incorporeal being floating in the fugue state between life and death._

_He dreams of a woman._

_The woman is tall and hard-faced, wearing a wolf-like, unyielding smile as she moves in a whirl of flashing metal and dark hair. She’s lightning, her movements precise. In her shadow there is another woman, smaller, just as fierce, whose movements also promise death to those who draw her ire, and he tries to call out to them when suddenly, the scene shifts -_

_He sees two more figures, one dark and one pale, tangled in a violent dance, the harsh clang of swords and screams all around them, unable to tell where one starts and the other ends, locked in a deadly embrace as the world around them burns -_

_A hanged man, his neck snapped and rope taut, skin mottled and purpling, eyes bulging, until, suddenly, the twitch of a finger, then hand, as the hanged man’s mouth opens and gasps a word in a tongue he cannot understand -_

  
_____________

Lewis wakes with a gasp, his body burned and broken and pulverized and _alive_.

When his vision adjusts to the brightness of the high noon sun overhead, he sees he is in a clearing in the forest, sidelong in the dirt, blood pooled around him. As he takes inventory of his situation, he realizes that he cannot feel anything, and then there is the snap of his neck into place with a crack and a surge of pain hot in every inch of his body, but that’s _impossible_ -

He glances down and watches, numbly, as his legs, burned and blackened and splayed at unnatural angles, the bones wet with blood and jutting from his shins and thighs, begin to settle, tucking themselves neatly within the muscles, skin forming unblemished and new over the breaks. He feels the searing burns receding from his face, watches as the charred flesh of his exposed arm molts into skin that is new and pale, the ache ebbing with every second until it’s a memory. All the while, he feels the unnatural curls and cracks that his body had adopted upon impact loosen, shift, straighten, and come together. Somehow, every fiber of his flesh, every nerve and every ligament and every muscle is reverting back to its rightful state, the uncanny feel of dirt and shrapnel being spit out, ejected from his body. He feels the gurgling gasps in his charred and shredded throat become sputtering, heaving breaths.

He is whole, alive, and alone in enemy territory.

 _I am dead,_ he thinks through gasps, touching the scorched material of his uniform, slick with blood. _I am dead, and this is a dream, and any minute I'll be nothing -_

Then, he raises his eyes to the woods around him and sees the proof of the explosion’s aftermath around him.

Burnt debris, still smoking. Further off, the spread of innards on a tree, a stray limb. Something red and grey and black and unidentifiable tangled in a mass of khaki green fibers hanging from the branches. Something. Someone.

When he touches a hand to his neck and feels only a day’s worth of stubble on his otherwise unscathed, cool skin, Lewis feels his stomach lurch, and vomits onto the grass.


End file.
